Thursday, October 4, 2012

A Time to Empower Our Communities

by Daniel M. Kammen

The Pacific Northwest and the San Francisco Bay Area, where I
live, are both areas where people are proud of their innovative local
communities, their universities and the exceptional local natural beauty. We are fortunate enough to live in areas that
have a real opportunity to do something about the both the persisting economic
doldrums and the growing threats to our local and the global environment.

Everyday the headlines bring home economic challenges and conflicts
due to energy resources.Conflicted
agendas in the Middle East, the power behind Hugo Chavez, the Keystone
pipeline, the current China-Japan tension over the Senkaku/Diaoyu
islands, and so forth.The list changes
week by week, but the story is the same.

What
is most amazing is that while energy demand is growing at record rates in
developing nations, we are not acting on the clear advantage we have in
providing that energy in ways that benefit us all. Nobel Prize winning work has shown that technological innovation
is central to economic growth and job creation.

So what do we do?My
laboratory in Berkeley publishes a regular update[1] on the job creation record
of fossil fuel and renewable energy and energy efficiency industries, and that
track record is clear: per dollar invested renewables and efficiency generate
significantly more jobs than the fossil fuel sector.That is not to say we don’t, at least for
now, need a portfolio of options, but if we want to meet a vast and growing
global need, and do so rapidly and cleanly, it is clear which sector can
deliver the goods: clean and efficient energy products.

Take solar power as just one
example where US universities and industrial laboratories have been leaders for
decades.

The capacity of the solar
industry to create jobs is similarly clear-cut. My laboratory regularly reviews
the actual job return on energy investment, and solar installation creates five
or more times the number of jobs than a comparable natural gas power plant.[i]And these jobs span a range of sectors.Not only has the US solar industry produced
more than 100,000 jobs (a doubling since 2009) with another 25,000 expected in
the next 12 months, the vast majority of these jobs are in finance, services,
and installation—not
manufacturing.Solar simply doesn’t
provide a lot of manufacturing jobs in any
country, and the number is dwindling further with automation.That’s why blocking imports is the wrong
move. Tens of thousands of Americans are employed across the country in the
solar value chain, and are relying on quality solar panels from many nations,
including, China for their jobs.Any
effort to lock out the competition will drive up panel prices and reduce sales,
stunting domestic job growth and stifling innovation in the field as a whole.

Even Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon,
one of the supporters of a petition ironically filed by German-based SolarWorldagainst Chinese solar panel
manufacturers, has acknowledged that punitive tariffs against Chinese solar
panels would immediately result in job losses to American installers in what he
described as “short-term shock.” This begs the question of why the U.S. government
would attempt to effectively pick technology winners from Germany by applying
punitive tariffs against Chinese companies when what is needed is to encourage
competition among all promising
companies.

As tragic as the loss of Solyndra
may be, some perspective is needed.The
federal loan guarantee program that supported Solyndra, as imperfect as it is,
has actually done a better job in the difficult area of ‘picking winners’ than
has Wall Street.

The reason for the drop we have
seen in solar panel prices, which in-turn led to the downfall of Solyndra and
likely others is quite simply scale of manufacturing.A number of the larger solar manufacturers
are now manufacturing solar panels on such a scale that they have brought the
cost of solar down dramatically.

What is needed?Clearly leaders in the public and private
sector with true global expertise and vision can help identify these ‘best
bets’.More broadly, however, we need
community partnerships that value new jobs and lifelong learning, and targeting
the fast-changing energy sector is a great place to start.

Daniel M. Kammen is the Distinguished Professor of energy at the
University of California, Berkeley, and will be the Feagle Lecturer at the
University of Washington on October 8, as well as lecturing at Orcas
Crossroads. From 2010 to 2011, he was the first chief technical specialistfor renewable energy and
energy efficiency at the World Bank, and is a member of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

1 comment:

I have to wonder a little why the local government hasn't seriously considered renewable energy sources yet. The area gets a lot of sun anyway so why not switch to solar power? It's not like the panels, installation procedures, and cleaning solar panels sunshine coast are that hard.